The Deepest Sin (12 page)

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Authors: Caroline Richards

BOOK: The Deepest Sin
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Hamilton looked startled. “Assistance? Why would you assist me, Lord ... when I cannot even hang on to your name?”
“I can lend you funds, if you require,” Archer said, glancing back over his shoulder to ensure no one should overhear. A remaining servant had slipped into the room to refresh the drinks, but was waved off by Archer's upraised hand. The footman retreated, yanked open the door and disappeared. “Your next wager, with me, will prove undeniably tempting.”
Hamilton's eyes flared wide. “Are you quite mad? Do you know whom you cross?”
“Why don't you tell me?” Archer's expression shifted.
“I don't know if I should,” Hamilton said, suddenly deflated, pushing away his brandy.
“You should,” Archer said lightly. “Hear what I offer, Hamilton.” He was all business now. “You have three thousand pounds on the table.”
“What of it?”
“You wish to play. I will match that amount. If you win, you shall double your money. If you lose, you tell me of your travails.”
Hamilton rallied, sitting up straight for the first time in three hours. “Why would you do that?” he countered.
“I'm bored, Hamilton. Like everyone else in this place. I will do anything to pass the time.” The words were not entirely false. Hamilton looked back and forth between Archer and the stain on the faded wallpaper across from him. He was not an unintelligent man, sensing that something was amiss, or hidden at least. Archer pasted a benign smile on his face, although he truly wanted to walk out, tell Hamilton to go bugger himself. And Spencer too.
And yet he was loath to leave. Because he knew Hamilton's drunken bacchanal had everything to do with Meredith Woolcott. Damn his memories, so recent that they flayed his very flesh. He was fleetingly drawn to the memory of the smoky gray pools of Meredith Woolcott's eyes, so vulnerable and proud at the same. She had swept from the library at Shepheard's as if she knew what lay ahead and meant to soldier through it. With her shoulders set stiffly back, she had walked through the library doors and without a backward glance had left him standing alone, with his cock practically in hand. All of which had necessitated several lies—to himself.
A chill ran through him. Unfamiliar and disturbing. When it came to Meredith Woolcott, he was a stranger to himself. Good God, he was no hero. Never had been. Why was he pursuing this travesty? Why had he returned to report to Spencer, ready to pursue the cause of Meredith Woolcott at all? He'd turned his back on Whitehall before. He chose his exploits for sheer amusement, for challenge, for the bloody hell of it, to pass the time. If there was another reason, it cut deep and several ways. He cursed Hamilton under his breath.
“Let's make this interesting, then,” he said gruffly, sweeping up the previous hands in one smooth motion round the table.
Hamilton narrowed his eyes. “Will we now?”
“In return for what you know,” Archer said smoothly, convinced that Hamilton knew very little indeed.
“I have money on the table.”
“You need not repay it.”
Hamilton sank lower into his chair, glowering. “You know me well and yet know me not at all, Lord Archer,” he said, finally remembering the name.
“Very few of us are original.” Archer paused. “May I?” He didn't wait for an answer but began shuffling the deck.
Hamilton nodded desultorily, scooping up his hand and then tipping the corner of his cards. In that instant, Archer made his move, aware that he was taking full advantage.
“Do you stand, Hamilton?” he asked perfunctorily.
There was nothing but silence and then Hamilton tapped the table with his knuckle and Archer slid him one more card. Archer then turned and said, “Will you draw?”
“Yes.”
Archer mentally shook his head. Then, with one flick of his fingertip, he turned his cards faceup. “Look what we have here,” he said into the quiet of the room. “Vingt-et-un.”
If he could have turned paler than he already was, Hamilton would have blanched. Instead, he dropped his head forward on the mahogany table. His words were muffled. “I can't tell you whom,” he moaned in a defeated voice.
No surprise there. “Then tell me what it is you have been asked to do,” said Archer helpfully, recalling the last time he had been part of an interrogation, in Marseille, with a man much more robust than Mr. Hamilton. “Trust me. I can help. You have already cut the ties that bind. With Miss Cressida,” he added helpfully.
Hamilton raised his head, fists supporting his drooping jaw. “You are right. All is lost and I am a fool if I do not follow through with this,” he said on a shaking breath, as though coming to a decision. “Tomorrow I am to make the acquaintance of a lady.”
Archer paused. “Hardly earth-shattering.”
Hamilton was endeavoring to be coherent for the first time that evening. “I am not adept at such things. You understand, Miss Cressida has been the only woman I have ever courted. And now she is lost to me.” His head thumped against the tabletop, upsetting his tumbler of brandy. The brown liquid spilled over his fists.
“So you have been telling us all evening, Hamilton.” The sun was leaking through the velveteen drapes, only serving to bring into sharp relief the scratches in the table, the stains on the wallpaper and the fingerprints on the abandoned brandy tumblers. Crockford's was not meant for the light of day.
“Who might this lady be? And why is she important to the scoundrel who has put you in such a position?” There was only so much time before even Hamilton would sober up. With any luck, he would not remember enough of the conversation to make sense of it.
“Some old, crabbed creature. I'm certain of it,” he mumbled into the new brandy that Archer thrust in his hand. He took a deep draught. “What else could she be, spending her time with her head in books, difficult translations, no place for a lady.” He rambled on, disconsolate. “And I am to pay her court ... the old wizened thing. What kind of female could she be? Giving a paper at Burlington House in two days. I didn't even know that sort of thing was permitted.”
Archer smiled tightly, then walked over to the window, thrust back the curtains and opened the sash. Cold morning air rushed into the fetid warmth of the room.
The game was afoot. Spencer and Whitehall had been right. Archer swore under his breath as he looked out into the cold morning light of winter. Meredith Woolcott had addled his brains for the last time.
 
Having seen Hamilton bundled into a hansom cab as promised, Archer walked down to Mayfair, ignoring one of Crockford's footmen who insisted that he take a conveyance. Pushing a fistful of coins into the man's hand, he took the side exit, two stairs at a time, inhaling the frost-tinged morning air. The last place he wanted to go was home, only to silence and the specter of Lady Meredith Woolcott and her fate which, increasingly, he held in his hands.
Contrary to the footman's grim exhortations, the walk through Soho did not put him in the way of footpads or cutthroats but merely his own bleak thoughts. A lucid clarity had settled around him, the effect of having spent thirty-six hours without sleep, hardly a first in his experience. Days and nights had blurred oftentimes enough on
The Brigand
, courtesy of inhospitable seas, unrelenting in their demand for attention. It wasn't a bad plan to keep in practice. The last time he'd stayed up four days in succession was in the port of Alexandria, while he and Rushford lay in wait to head off an ambush set up by the Emir Damietta. Archer allowed himself the ghost of a smile. Whitehall had been pleased when they'd pulled that rabbit out of a hat.
Whitehall—and its insatiable appetite for information. He recalled Spencer's self-satisfied mien, when he'd learned about the attack on Meredith in Rashid. More evidence that Faron still lived and would not relent until he had Lady Woolcott in his grasp. His gut tightened at what he'd read in the second dossier that Spencer had readily supplied. And at the scene on
The Brigand
that Rushford had recalled.
Meredith Woolcott was my first love. And I hers
.
It was impossible. Repulsive. Archer felt his stomach twist.
I do not wear this mask without reason.... There are wounds that go far beyond the superficialities of the skin and inward to the mind and spirit
.
Faron's words. And his confession that he had set fire to the nursery in which Rowena and Julia had slept as mere babes. Archer recalled the copper cylinder, the child's kaleidoscope he had recovered from the dead Arab. More proof, if they were looking for it, that Faron still lived. Who else would have kept and sent such a horrific memento?
Archer kept walking, pulling up his collar against a rising wind. What was their story, he wondered, and how had it created the evil that followed in their wake still? It had been difficult to read the dossier, to envision Meredith as a young girl, the daughter of a scholar, the second son of a minor English baron who had been sent out to make his own way in the world. The young Christian Woolcott had found himself a position in France, at Claire de Lune, the august chateau of one of the oldest, most powerful families in France. His daughter and the young Comte Montagu had studied together, laughed together, grown up together, exploring the lush green of the countryside as their young love blossomed.
Archer wanted nothing more than to stanch the bleeding images that unspooled in his mind. Calm clarity had just dissolved into a hot burning tide. His muscles were tense, his pulse pounding, a deep dissatisfaction welling from his core. He turned down the narrow lane to find himself passing the West London Boxing Club, where in a few hours those who had not found surfeit in the clubs such as Crockford's or White's would find their satisfaction in the arena. He himself preferred
The Brigand
and a few weeks at sea. There was no better way to clear a man's blood of ill humors.
The Brigand
was currently moored at his country estate on the Channel, its constrained living quarters far more hospitable to his bleak mood than the baronial pile up the hill that had been in his family for centuries. For a moment, he considered abandoning it all, riding to the coast and disappearing into the horizon for a few months. Spencer would be disappointed but not surprised.
He couldn't do it. Simply disappear. Despite the fact that he felt a stranger in his own skin, beset by the images of a tall, red-haired woman with shadowed gray eyes. How this had happened he would never know. Bloody, bloody inconvenient. He rolled his shoulders, trying to restore a measure of familiar calm, to narrow his options and focus his anger. He stopped mid-stride. If Faron would be flushed from whatever sinkhole or grave he now made his own, he would be there waiting for him. Archer unclenched his fists, suddenly at ease with his decision.
London suited his mood in all its winter pallor, the bare branches of the hedges interchangeable with the wrought-iron fences that cordoned off handsome town houses on the main square of Mayfair. They looked down their noses at passersby, tall and proud, dominating one of the most exclusive areas of the city. Turning down one of the mews, Archer walked another hundred paces before turning into the kitchen entrance of a town house. Letting himself in with a key, he moved silently through the servants' entrance, its inhabitants still slumbering. Copper pans danced overhead as he moved with easy familiarity through the house. He stopped at the entrance of the breakfast room, an apple-green confection of watered silk wallpaper and velvet curtains as dainty as the woman who sat, her golden curls catching a shaft of morning sun, on a chaise longue, book on her lap and a cup of coffee at her elbow. The Countess Blenheim was considered by the
ton
to be a remarkably pretty widow, Archer knew.
Looking up, Camille was startled and then made as if to throw her book at him. “Good lord, Richard. You have given me a start! I will never understand how you move so silently. You're not the smallest man in Christendom, after all. You know you might have used the front door.”
He strode into the room to drop a kiss upon her head. The familiar aroma of vanilla and roses enveloped him.
“It's been a while,” she murmured, looping her arms around his neck, the book falling to the floor.
“My apologies,” he said, gently removing her hands from his shoulders. “I have been awash in business since Cairo. As for the front entrance, I know that you'd prefer I did not alert your butler.” He crossed the room, shrugged out of his jacket with long familiarity, and sat down.
Camille made a moue of disappointment. “I have missed you sorely. Your discretion least of all.” She took the sting from the reproof by smiling, showing her small, pearly teeth.
“I find that difficult to believe,” Archer returned with a grin, a measure of his customary good humor returning in her presence. “When have men not beaten down your door for a moment of your company?”
“You flatterer,” she said, drawing the chiffon wisp of a dressing gown more closely around her body. She watched him cast about for a servant. “You are looking for coffee, no doubt.” Turning to ring a bell at her side, she moved with the confident knowledge that her household was as well run as a ship in Her Majesty's Navy. Short moments later a maid in a mobcap appeared with the requisite urn.

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